Dan Simmons: University

“I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 1 (p. 90)

Life , Faith , Law , Understanding

“Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 198)

Love , Understanding , Universe , Personality

“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 38 (p. 369)

Nature , Universe , Change , Parting

“To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 18 (pp. 348-349)

Love , Life , Pain , Truth

“I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—in keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe.
I think that is was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 30 (p. 262)

Thinking , Parent , Universe , Night

““The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 400)

Love , Religion , Feeling , Lovers

“I began to understand. “A Faustian bargain…,” I said.
“The Faustian bargain,” said the girl. “All the church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.””

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 50 (p. 498)

Soul , Girl , Understanding , Universe

“If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this…these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one’s beloved.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 531)

Secret , Universe

“After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 292)

Life , Behavior , Universe , Evil

“The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.
It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (pp. 492-493)

Love , Understanding , Universe , Season

“If the universe has any soul, it is the soul of irony.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 25 (p. 548)

Soul , Universe

““The Core knows what Teilhard de Chardin and other sentimentalists refused to acknowledge: evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 20 (p. 406)

Life , Tree , Universe , Change

“While I was obsessed with my own misery, there were other things occurring in the human universe.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 21 (p. 422)

Universe

“If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 5 (p. 345)

Law , Universe , Time , Personality

“The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 34 (p. 344)

Universe , Indifference , Fate